Vincent Jacobs > Recent Status Updates

“Why is psychology the youngest of the empirical sciences? Why have we not long since discovered the unconscious and raised up its treasure-house of eternal images? Simply because we had a religious formula for everything psychic-and one that is far more beautiful and comprehensive than immediate experience.“

“…the psyche contains all the images that have ever given rise to myths…”

“[primitive man’s] knowledge of nature is essentially the language and outer dress of an unconscious psychic process.”

“All the mythologized processes of nature, such as summer and winter, the phases of the moon, the rainy sea- sons, and so forth, are in no sense allegories of these objective occurrences; rather they are symbolic expressions of the inner, unconscious drama of the psyche which becomes accessible to man's consciousness by way of projection-that is, mirrored in the events of nature.“

“It is not enough for the primitive to see the sun rise and set; this external observation must at the same time be a psychic happening: the sun in its course must represent the fate of a god or hero who, in the last analysis, dwells nowhere except in the soul of man.”

“… man simply didn't know that the psyche contains all the images that have ever given rise to myths, and that our unconscious is an acting and suffering subject with an inner drama which primitive man rediscovers, by means of analogy, in the processes of nature both great and small.”

“All the mythologized processes of nature, such as summer and winter, the phases of the moon, the rainy seasons, and so forth, are in no sense allegories of these objective occurrences; rather they are symbolic expressions of the inner, unconscious drama of the psyche which becomes accessible to man's consciousness by way of projection-that is, mirrored in the events of nature.“

“It is not enough for the primitive to see the sun rise and set; this external observation must at the same time be a psychic happening: the sun in its course must represent the fate of a god or hero who, in the last analysis, dwells nowhere except in the soul of man.”

“Primitive man is not much interested in objective explanations of the obvious, but he has an imperative need-or rather, his unconscious psyche has an irresistible urge-to assimilate all outer sense experiences to inner, psychic events.”

“However magnificent the dawn that will illumine your life, in the end you'll still be nailed down in your coffin and thrown into a pit.'”

“He visits the hospital about twice a week, inspects the wards and sees out-patients. The total lack of antiseptics and cupping-glasses worries him, but he doesn't introduce any changes for fear of upsetting Ragin, whom he considers an old rogue, suspects of being a man of means and secretly envies. He would love to have Ragin's job.”

“'I'm serving a harmful cause,' he thinks, 'and I receive a salary from those I deceive. So I'm dishonest. But then I'm nothing by myself, just a mere particle in a necessary social evil. All the district officials are crooks and they get paid for doing nothing means it's not myself who is guilty of dishonesty, but the times we live in If I were to be born two hundred years from now I'd be a different person.'

“It is just as strange to seek immortality in the transmutation of matter as predicting a brilliant future for the case after a valuable violin has been smashed and rendered useless.'

2/2 “Merely for him to grow cold and be whirled around there was absolutely no need to draw man – with his sublime, almost divine intellect - out of nothingness and then to turn him into clay, as if in mockery.”

1/2 “Oh, why isn't man immortal?' he asks himself. 'Why these cerebral cortices and convolutions, why vision, speech, sensation, genius, if all are doomed to pass into the soil and finally grow cold with the earth's crust and then to be borne for millions of years with the earth around the sun, without rhyme or reason?”

“All these prejudices, abominations and foul living conditions were necessary, since in the course of time they would be converted into something useful, like manure into fertile soil. There was nothing good in this world that did not contain some abomination in its earliest beginnings.”

“Ragin concluded that It was an immoral institution, highly injurious to the health of its patients. In his opinion it would be best to discharge the patients and close the hospital. But, he reasoned, will-power alone was not sufficient to achieve this… Therefore one should wait until it disappeared of its own accord. Besides, if people opened a hospital and tolerated it, that could only mean they needed it.”

“Inevitably, we move here on uncertain ground... Naturally every investigator must document his findings as fully as possible, but he should also venture an occasional hypothesis even at the risk of making a mistake. Mistakes are, after all, the foundations of truth, and if a man does not know what a thing is, it is at least an increase in knowledge if he knows what it is not.”

“On this level of understanding, evil appears more as a distortion, a deformation, a misinterpretation and misapplication of facts that in themselves are natural.”

“If it has been believed hitherto that the human shadow was the source of all evil, it can now be ascertained on closer investigation that the unconscious man, that is, his shadow, does not consist only of morally reprehensible tendencies, but also displays a number of good qualities, such as normal instincts, appropriate reactions, realistic insights, creative impulses, etc.”

“Stupidity, sin, sickness, old age, and death continue to form the dark foil that sets off the joyful splendour of life.”

“Mathematics, for instance, has more than once proved that its purely logical constructions which transcend all experience subsequently coincided with the behaviour of things. This, like the events I call synchronistic, points to a profound harmony between all forms of existence.”

2/2 “Psyche and matter exist in one and the same world, and each partakes of the other, otherwise any reciprocal action would be impossible. If research could only advance far enough, therefore, we should arrive at an ultimate agreement between physical and psychological concepts.”

1/1 “Psyche cannot be totally different from matter, for how otherwise could it move matter? And matter cannot be alien to psyche, for how else could matter produce psyche?”

“The space-time quaternio is the archetypal sine qua non for any apprehension of the physical world-indeed, the very possibility of apprehending it. It is the organizing schema par excellence among the psychic quaternities. In its structure it corresponds to the psychological schema of the functions. The 3: 1 proportion frequently occurs in dreams and in spontaneous mandala-drawings.”

“…[in] the three-dimensionality of space… time can be conceived as a fourth dimension. But if we look at it in terms of the three qualities of time-past, present, future-then static space, in which changes of state occur, must be added as a fourth term. In both cases, the fourth represents an incommensurable Other that is needed for their mutual determination. Thus we measure space by time and time by space.”

2/2 “This is the treasure which the snake (or dragon) guards…
Its unrelatedness, coldness, and dangerousness express the instinctuality that with ruthless cruelty rides roughshod over all moral and any other human wishes and considerations and is therefore just as terrifying and fascinating in its effects as the sudden glance of a poisonous snake.”

1/2 “Since the shadow… is unconscious… the snake would correspond to what is totally unconscious and incapable of becoming conscious, but which, as the collective unconscious and as instinct, seems to possess a peculiar wisdom of its own and a knowledge that is often felt to be supernatural.”

“…the observer is inseparable from the observed and always disturbs it by the act of observation. In other words, exact observation of the unconscious prejudices observation of the conscious and vice versa.”

“The importance of consciousness should not be underrated; hence it is advisable to relate the contradictory manifestations of the unconscious causally to the conscious attitude… consciousness should not be overrated either, for experience provides too many incontrovertible proofs of the autonomy of unconscious compensatory processes for us to seek the origin of these antinomies only in the conscious mind.”